


Who Is Like God

by orphan_account



Series: Season 14 Codas [1]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Biblical References, Coda, Episode: s14e10 Nihilism, Established Castiel/Dean Winchester, Established Relationship, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Season/Series 14, Season/Series 14 Spoilers, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-18
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-10-12 08:13:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17463848
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me."I can give Dean back to you."





	Who Is Like God

**Author's Note:**

> 14x10 coda. The Catholic jumped out.

Michael uses Dean Winchester’s mouth to tell Castiel that even God can die, and Castiel is so badly shaken by the cognitive dissonance inherent in hearing his Father’s firstborn son indulge in blasphemy that he blurts, “I know. Roughly three years prior to your entering this world, He nearly did. The Darkness dealt Him a death blow. He got better.”

“More’s the pity,” says Michael, and although the ways in which he bends Dean’s face around the words are alien and perverted, Castiel ventures to catalogue his expression as _unsurprised_. Castiel is unsurprised as well; if Michael saw Chuck in Dean’s memories, he would have seen Amara as well. “I’ll just have to finish the job, then, won’t I?”

The phrasing is informal, but the cadence is not. Even putting aside the slightly higher pitch at which Michael speaks, he sounds nothing like Dean. His voice is not rough from years of shouting himself hoarse on hunts. He does not slur his words. He speaks as all angels speak, as if he’ll never grow entirely used to the vocal cords in his throat and the tongue in his mouth.  

“You’re not Amara,” says Castiel, stating the crushingly obvious. Michael may be the mightiest of God’s archangels, but Amara is primordial. Primeval. Even an angel cannot truly conceive of what She is, of a universe empty of God and His creations. “If He can survive Her, He can certainly survive _you_.”

Had Castiel baited Lucifer as he’s baiting Michael, the Morningstar’s eyes would have flared red with rage, but Lucifer was the petulant younger brother, the spoilt favorite. Michael is the older brother. Michael is the _eldest_ brother out of hundreds of thousands of brothers. He is patient. He is _composed_.

“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Michael leans back in his chair. He’s _slouching_. Relaxed. Certain that he’ll get out of those chains one way or another. “I can be creative.”

Castiel snorts. It’s a deliberate sound, but no less genuine for being calculated. “It’s not in an angel’s nature to be _creative_. God is creative. _Humans_ are creative. Not us. We’re static. Unchanging.”

Michael tilts his head, and it’s disturbing, Castiel is _disturbed_ to see his own mannerisms—an _angel’s_ mannerisms—acted out with Dean’s body. Castiel is reacting to Michael in Dean’s vessel the way humans react to poorly constructed automatons. Uncanny Valley. That’s what the humans call this phenomenon.

“Not you,” Michael says. “You’ve changed.” He lifts Dean’s cuffed hands and taps Dean’s temple, a muted thud of bone on bone. The chains around his wrists rattle. “I’ve seen it. I’ve seen your slow downward spiral. I’ve seen your progression from an unthinking hammer to Daddy’s little rebel. I’ve seen your fall from grace, Castiel, and the catalyst is perfectly clear: when you first laid a hand on Dean in Hell, you were lost.”

Michael’s words are too like Hester’s to be the product of coincidence, and they are effective as an angel blade to the throat, but Castiel does not flinch. Dean wouldn’t want him to flinch.

“You’re wrong,” says Castiel, and knows it to be true. Where once he had unwavering faith in God, he now has unwavering faith in Dean. “I wasn’t lost. I was found.”

Michael rolls Dean’s eyes. Within a cage of blood and bone and viscera, his true form rustles with clear distaste. “Please,” he says. “Spare me the Hallmark moment.”

It’s so like something Dean would say that it would steal Castiel’s breath if he had breath to steal. As it is, his own true form caves in on itself like a wounded bird, and Michael sees it. The hard line of his mouth, of Dean’s mouth, softens. His stolen face rearranges itself into a rough approximation of pity.

Castiel could kill him just for that. _Would_ kill him, if he had the means. If he could kill Michael without killing Dean.  

“Oh, Castiel,” says Michael, and that’s wrong, too. Castiel has been _Cas_ for ten years now. Not Castiel of the Lord, but Cas of the Winchesters. “Don’t look so hurt. We’re still family, you and I, in an abstract sort of way. You’re not our Father, and I hold no ill will toward you personally.”

Castiel very nearly scoffs. He doesn’t, in the end, but his lips still hold the shape of the sound, and Michael acknowledges his disbelief with a lopsided shrug, Dean’s shoulder tensing beneath the line of Michael’s tailored jacket.

“Well,” Michael allows, raising his bound wrists in illustration. “A little ill will, perhaps, but that’s entirely on you. Had you stayed out of my way, I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on your windswept little head.”

“Forgive me for not taking anything you have to say at face value.” Never let it be said that Castiel has not mastered the finer nuances of human sarcasm in his years on Earth.

But Michael ignores Castiel, which is easily enough done, Castiel supposes, when one cares only for the sound of one’s own voice.

“God will die by my hand.” Michael sounds nothing at all like the loyal son Castiel once followed unquestioningly into battle. Sounds nothing at all like the elder brother who told him to be gentle with the fish that heaved itself onto a muddy shore. “But you don’t have to, Castiel.”

Castiel’s hearing is perfect, but still he requests clarification. “What?”

Michael clasps his hands, folding Dean’s long fingers over his thick wrist. “I dislike repeating myself, brother.”

“I’m not your brother.” Michael’s younger brother died by Castiel’s own hand, an act of mercy and necessity both. “And I don’t understand why you would spare me.”

Michael pulls Dean’s full lips into a smile, pink tongue between white teeth. “Would you believe that I’ve come to like you? You know as well as I do that existing within a vessel can be…confusing. Our hosts’ memories bleed into our own. The ‘profound bond’ you share with Dean Winchester—” Michael’s fingers curve into air quotes, and Castiel refuses to call that a shared familial trait. “—it almost feels as if you share that bond with _me_.”

Everything in Castiel cringes away from the mere suggestion of sharing _anything_ , anything at all, with his eldest brother’s unhinged doppelganger. It’s perverse. It’s _obscene_.

Moreover, it’s not the first time that an unstable archangel has tried to seduce Castiel into his way of thinking, and this is what allows him to gather the will to speak.  

“I doubt you feel this alleged bond strongly enough to spare me out of the goodness of your heart.” Or lack thereof.

Michael lifts his chained arms as high as he can, palms up, fingers spread. “If I’m to be the new God,” he says, “will I not require a host of seraphim to sing my praises? I’d compensate you handsomely for your services, of course. You need only say yes.”

How strange it is, to bear witness to Saint Michael the Archangel playing the serpent in the garden.  

Michael cannot mean any of this genuinely. He’s stalling, and if he’s not stalling, he’s toying with Castiel as he toyed with Jack. Castiel should get up and walk away. Those chains may not hold forever, but they’ll hold long enough, and Castiel need not keep Michael under his constant supervision. At the very least, he shouldn’t rise to Michael’s bait.

Still, he hears himself saying, _reciting_ , “‘Again, the devil taketh him up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them; And saith unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me.’”

Michael skims Dean’s teeth over his lower lip and watches Castiel through narrowed eyes. Weighing. Considering.

“Drawing parallels between Saint Michael the Archangel and Satan in the wilderness,” Michael says thoughtfully. “Some would call that blasphemy.”

“No,” says Castiel, unsurprised by Michael’s hypocrisy. “Setting out to kill God and take His place—that’s blasphemy.” Castiel may put little faith in God these days, but he’s still angel enough to cringe away from Michael’s hubris.

Thinking of hubris, Castiel adds, “You know, I once tried to set myself up as the new God. It didn’t end well for me. In my defense, I was possessed by the leviathan. What’s your excuse?”

It’s a rhetorical question. Castiel knows Michael’s excuse just as he knew Lucifer’s excuse. Michael is mad with grief, with disappointment, with betrayal. Castiel felt those things too when his Father refused to intervene during that first Apocalypse. He felt these things, and still he did not use them to justify burning the world to ash.

“You were never meant to wield that kind of power, Castiel.” Michael shifts back to pity as easily as flicking a switch, still moving Dean’s face in all the wrong ways. “You’re just a seraph. Me? I’m an archangel. The firstborn. I’m next to Godliness. Who’s to say that I _wasn’t_ meant to inherent our Father’s throne?”

“ _Quis ut Deus_?” Castiel retorts. _Who is like God?_ “Your name was meant to be rhetorical, you know.” A rhetorical question with a self-evident answer: no one. No one is like God but God. “But there _was_ a time when you knew that, wasn’t there? _My_ Michael knew it.”

“Did he?” this Michael counters. “He certainly had enough hubris to jumpstart the Apocalypse without dear old Dad’s permission, now, didn’t he?  

Perhaps. Perhaps Castiel’s Michael would have gone down the same path as this corrupted Michael had the Winchesters not interfered. As Castiel is not omniscient, he’ll never know for certain. He’s _glad_ not to know for certain.  

Michael takes an unneeded breath through Dean’s nose before sighing it back out, an actor playing a longsuffering elder brother.  

“Castiel,” he says, too gently. “I’m not your Michael, and I’m not Lucifer, either. I know what you think of me, but I’m not some petulant child throwing a fit. I’m not a favored son having a cosmic temper tantrum at the world’s expense because my position as God’s best beloved was usurped by humanity. I am trying to right a wrong. Look me in the eyes and tell me that you don’t want our Father to answer for his neglect.”

Castiel cannot.

Michael smiles. No, he _smirks_. “You understand where I’m coming from,” he says, soft and coaxing and so unlike the look on his face, on _Dean’s_ face. “You kept faith in God even when your archangels set out to bring the world down around you, and for what? What has God given you in return? Aside from a few extra lives in your health bar, that is.”

 _Dean_ , Castiel doesn’t say. _He gave me Dean. He gave me Sam and He gave me Jack and He gave me the capacity to feel as deeply as any human. By leaving this world to its own devices, He gave me the gift of free will._

Castiel does not say any of these things, because he knows that Michael wouldn’t understand. That he wouldn’t want to understand.

“I can give Dean back to you." 

Castiel’s eyes widen fractionally. His ruined wings tense. His true form grows still as petrified stone.

“After a fashion,” Michael amends. “I'll never let him go entirely—you understand—but I could loosen the reins, so to speak. Every once in a while, anyway. Give the two of you some alone time.” Michael’s smile stretches wide and obscene and _knowing_. “If you’d like.”

Humans pray to this creature. They canonized him as a saint and wear medals stamped with his likeness around their necks. They call him Prince of the Heavenly Host and paint pictures of him trampling the Devil. They love him as they love God and Christ and the Holy Mother. Above all else, they believe him to be _good_. Saint Michael the Archangel, Protector of Humanity.

And perhaps he _was_ good, once, as Castiel’s Michael was good. Once, but no longer. Now he’s the tempter on the mountain.

Castiel’s mind races. He thinks of the easy intimacy he and Dean share, of standing in a motel bathroom with fogged-up mirrors and an ancient toilet while Dean talks to him through the shower curtain. Of sitting patiently through a Clint Eastwood marathon while Dean puts his cold feet in Castiel’s lap.

He thinks of Dean kissing him in the Impala outside of that brothel. Of the first wet, easy slide of Dean’s thick pink cock into Castiel’s trembling body. Of coming so hard he blew out every light fixture in the motel and of how Dean laughed and laughed and _laughed_ at Castiel until he choked on his own spit. Of Dean’s plush mouth, of his dry lips and his wet teeth. Of the way his stomach clenches, hot and tight and painful with lust, whenever Dean wraps his lips around the neck of a bottle, drinking fast and sloppy so that rivulets of beer dribble down his chin. Of the musky human smell of him, strongest at his neck and groin and underarms. Of only feeling truly grounded in his vessel, in his human flesh, when Dean touches him. Of just. Feeling anything at all.  

Castiel sits up straight in his seat. Folds his wings tight around his vessel’s shoulders and thinks of digging his fingers—not his vessel’s fingers; his _real_ fingers—into the concave of Dean’s torso and wrenching Michael out of him. Of locking Michael in a different vessel and tearing out his Grace and making him live in the dirt with the humans he would slaughter.

“Go to Hell,” Castiel tells Michael, and means it literally.  

Michael blinks. Dean’s eyelashes glitter like strands of gold beneath the bunker’s harsh fluorescent lights. The shape of his face is a dream, the uneven slope of his nose and the points of his ears imperfect in ways that only serve to underscore his beauty. He’s a work of art. All humans are, but Dean. Dean is special.

Castiel will not allow Michael to break this man.   

“I’ll take that as a ‘no,’” says Michael. He neither sounds nor looks particularly disappointed.

Castiel stands up. Circles his chair and grips the back of it so hard the wood splinters and pulps beneath his fingers.

“I’ll pull you out of him myself,” Castiel tells Michael. “I’ll make it last. I’ll make it hurt. And when I’m through with you, you’ll long for the relief of the Cage.”

Michael’s posture shifts. His shoulders round. His face pinches, but it’s not fear that’s making him look that way.

“Put your money where your mouth is, Cas.”

He looks like Dean when he says it. He _sounds_ like Dean when he says it.

Castiel can endure no more of this.

He leaves. He seeks out Sam and Jack. He thinks of blue-white Grace bleeding out of a faceless vessel, of Michael’s agonized cries, of a self-professed god brought low. He does not think of the sour regret curdling his stomach or of bargaining away his principles for one more minute, one more _second_ , of Dean’s smiling mouth pressed against his. Of Michael granting Dean brief flashes of freedom, of relief, only to withdraw it all as quickly as a king withdraws his favor. 

And above all else, he does not think of how desperately tempted he was to say yes.


End file.
